Paycheck (short story)
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Paycheck is a short story by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, involving an engineer, who, after working two years on a secret project, had those two years erased from his memory. He wakes up after having those two years of his memory erased to find he traded away his paycheck for an envelope full of seemingly unrelated personal items.
He soon discovers that during those two years he worked on a machine that let people view the future, and he used that knowledge to select a number of items that would save his life and allow him to return to his employer and blackmail him. Each item serves a particular purpose or gets him through a situation that he saw in advance. The items are:
- A code key
- A ticket stub
- A parcel receipt
- A length of fine wire
- Half a broken poker chip
- A green strip of cloth
- A bus token
The story was later made into a 2003 film starring Ben Affleck.
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